341. Some Like It Hot (1959)

Directed by Billy Wilder

Synopsis

After witnessing a mob massacre, two musicians decide to do some drag as female musicians in order to escape. They were not, however, planning on Sugar Kane or Osgood.

Review

Billy Wilder brings us what is not only a really funny comedy, because it is that, but also a spoof of films like Little Caesar or Scarface, those early thirties mob films and a pretty revolutionary comedy in the kind of humour used.

The humour is of course full of sexual and homosexual innuendo, something which you were not seeing frequently coming out of anywhere at the time. This humour is also tempered with an actually dangerous situation in which the characters are thrust.

This mix of danger and comedy makes the film quite revolutionary, Spats isn't a comedy villain (even if Napoleon is that), and the comedy comes from the situation characters are thrust in as well as some brilliantly ambiguous dialogue. A great comedy.

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The film was originally planned to be filmed in full color, but after several screen tests, it had to be changed to black and white because of a very obvious 'green tint' around the heavy make-up required by Curtis and Lemmon when portraying Josephine and Daphne. The Florida segment was filmed at the Hotel Del Coronado in Coronado, California.

Some Like It Hot received a "C" (Condemned) rating from the Catholic Legion of Decency. The film, along with Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and several other films, led to the end of the Production Code in the mid-1960s. It was released by United Artists without the MPAA logo in the credits or title sequence, since the film did not receive Production Code approval.

Tony Curtis is frequently quoted as saying that kissing Marilyn Monroe was like "kissing Hitler." In a 2001 interview with Leonard Maltin, Curtis stated that he never made this claim.

The film's title is a line in the nursery rhyme "Pease Porridge Hot." It also occurs as dialogue in the film when Joe, as "Junior", tells Sugar he prefers classical music over hot jazz. The film's working title was "Not Tonight, Josephine".

Trailer: